A large stratified sample of university undergraduate students differing in reading ability performed a diverse set of psychometric and information processing tasks in a study exploring the role of visual information processing skill as a component in reading ability. Using a correlation analysis of individual differences, the interrelationships among the various measures were examined, treating reading time and reading comprehension separately. Two central findings emerged. First, reading comprehension shares the same processes as listening comprehension, and this cannot be accounted for by general intelligence. Second, visual information processing predicts reading ability considerably better when the units of analysis are words as opposed to letters; this prediction improves with the size and complexity of the lexical unit. A multivariate view of reading best accommodates the findings. (Author/RL)